Comments on: Some new info from the web on timing and choice of larva http://www.littleluceyfarm.com/honeybees/index.php/2014/06/some-new-info-from-the-web-on-timing-and-choice-of-larva/ Trying to get a handle on these amazing creatures Sun, 24 Apr 2016 00:42:00 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.35 By: Todd http://www.littleluceyfarm.com/honeybees/index.php/2014/06/some-new-info-from-the-web-on-timing-and-choice-of-larva/#comment-10 Sat, 21 Jun 2014 03:14:40 +0000 http://www.littleluceyfarm.com/honeybees/?p=231#comment-10 About bee density:
The OSU paper Doolittle method of making the nurse hive was to use very full queenright hive after removing the queen. In other words pull the queen and a couple of frames to support the queen and put those in a new nuc or hive and just use the original hive for the nurse colony. This may sacrifice the original hive in a sense, but may be the best way to have the density of nurse bees necessary.

]]> By: Liz Thompson http://www.littleluceyfarm.com/honeybees/index.php/2014/06/some-new-info-from-the-web-on-timing-and-choice-of-larva/#comment-8 Sat, 21 Jun 2014 01:16:58 +0000 http://www.littleluceyfarm.com/honeybees/?p=231#comment-8 I, too, was reading the Michael Bush website on queen rearing. The part that caught my eye was about bee density:

“The most important thing about a cell starter is that it’s overflowing with bees. Queenless is helpful too, but if I had to choose between queenless and overflowing with bees, I’d go for the bees. You want a very high density of bees. This can be in a small box or a large hive, it’s the density that is the issue, not the total number. There are many different schemes to end up with queenless crowded bees that want to build cells, but don’t ever expect a good amount of cells from a starter that is anything less than overflowing with bees.”

He then goes on to talk about how he achieves this density:

“The simplest way I know of is to remove a queen from a strong colony the day before and cut it down to minimum space (remove all the empty frames so that you can remove some boxes and, if there are supers that are full remove those). This may even put them in a mood to swarm, but that will make a lot of queen cells.

It sounds to me like he is talking about removing the queen and crowding two strong boxes of bees into one if possible. I’m not suggesting that we really try that at this point in the season but it does give an idea of how thick the bees need to be in the cell builder. Maybe with the number of bees we have we would be better off building very small dense nucs, just a couple frames, like those in the queen castle in Round 1.

Just a thought.

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